


a vision too removed to mention.

by wolvesandgirls



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Non-Descriptive Mentions of Sex, Post-Canon, Stalin's Russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-20 13:54:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14895821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolvesandgirls/pseuds/wolvesandgirls
Summary: A voice came. It called consolingly: “Come here, Leave your deaf and sinful country. Leave Russia forever. The blood from your hands I will wash, The black shame from your heart I will release, I will soothe pain of defeats and insults, With the balm of a new name.”But calmly, with cool blood, I clenched my ears with my fist…





	a vision too removed to mention.

A voice came. It called consolingly:  
“Come here,  
Leave your deaf and sinful country.  
Leave Russia forever.  
The blood from your hands I will wash  
The black shame from your heart I will release  
I will soothe pain of defeats and insults  
With the balm of a new name.”  
But calmly, with cool blood,  
I clenched my ears with my fist…  
  
-Anna Akhmatova ( _Когда в тоске самоубийства_ , or _When in suicidal anguish_ , 1918)

* * *

i.

She sidles up to him at a tiny bar, and a sick, sad part of him wishes that on a snowy afternoon he had handed her employment papers rather than tea and a slice of lemon. Maybe then they’d still be the right type of Russians.

It’s hard to look at her now, hard to stare into eyes he once wished he could drown in. Instead, he focuses on her pretty fingernails, the dirt and grime of Russia scrubbed out from under them. He wonders if she and the conman beat each other with birch branches, but it takes him a moment to remember that not all customs existed outside the crooked streets of Leningrad. In Paris, it might be sprigs of lavender and shattered bottles of perfume. Pretty, meaningless things.

Without even moving, she demands his attention, and _oh_ , she knows him so well. But it’s the lead in his stomach that stops him from turning his head. The leaden, sinking feeling. The...

Shame. Shame that he had held a gun to her throat with such conviction, shame that his conviction could only go so far. He thinks of old friends who’d laugh at him for managing to let down the only two things he’s ever loved simultaneously, and he thinks he’d laugh too as their bullets pierced his skull.

Her drink is placed in front of her, and she raises her cup to him. Gleb finally forces himself to look at her, and he is struck how even _Romanov_ , she is better than beautiful. She is sharp lines and soft curves, and the warmth of summer and death of winter. He remembers their first kiss in an alleyway, how her tongue touched his top lip and he thought his heart would pound right out of his chest.

“Is this a coup?” He asks. He means it as a joke, he thinks, but his voice is tight, untuned.

“Of sorts,” and she grins just enough that he spies the silvery-white of her teeth. Growing up, his mother had always warned him of wolves, but never about the girls who were raised by them. Perhaps she should have. Anya brushes a lock of hair out of her face, a hint of derision never leaving her smiling eyes. “I told you I wasn’t interested in the crown.”

Gleb smiles, a broken, bloody thing. She was not the first Romanov to say such golden words.

“I’m listening,” he says, his bones creaking as he sits up straight in his chair. He leans towards her. She doesn’t smell of birch or lavender, and a dirty, secret part of him rejoices.

“I wanted to tell you about a dream I had,” she starts, and she leans on the bar, resting her chin against her hand. She smiles, _volchiy_. “It was about a princess who gets a disgraced officer drunk, drunk enough that he forgets himself and herself and takes her back to his hotel room.”

“We both know you wouldn’t have to get me drunk,” he admits, and she laughs, easy and chiming.

“It was a nice dream, Gleb. That’s all I’m saying.”

He used to think that if his heart pounded right out of his chest, it would fall right into her hands. She was the only one who really knew how it worked, and he used to think that she’d sink her teeth into it before ever returning it to him.

Maybe that was the moment he was truly lost to her.

 

ii.

He kisses the calluses and splintered fingers that betray her blue blood, and runs his tongue along scars that confirm it all the more. She pulls his mouth to hers desperately, wrapping her hands around his neck, dragging her fingers through his hair, devouring his moans like meals.

Gleb whispers both her names into her naked skin, and when she tells him which one to use he calls her a tyrant, but still lets her steal the name from his mouth all the same. She kisses like it is the first time and the last time, and her breath feels so heavy and sweet in his lungs he almost believes he could stay.

She still curls up on his bare chest like a feral animal on the simmering ashes of burnt forest, and if his mother had ever warned him about girls raised by wolves, he’d have known the first time that she didn’t just pin him out of affection.

“I’ve been told I’ve visited Paris in the spring before, but they must be lying. I can’t imagine ever forgetting it. I never knew the sun could feel like this,” she murmurs, and he sighs softly in agreement. As if holding her hadn’t always felt like holding the sun in his hopeless arms.

She rolls onto her stomach, her eyes boring down on him with too much weight. She twists a curl of his hair around her finger before pressing her thumb to his lips, testing his reflexes. He kisses it sweetly.

“I’ve heard the blossoms are beautiful in April,” and her words wind around his body like ropes, tying him to the bed, to her basement, to her new, foreign life. They don’t even hurt, don’t even sting as they bite into his flesh, and perhaps that is what catches him off guard, what makes something akin to hope spark behind her eyes. “I know how much you love the colours of a city in spring.”

“Moscow blooms in May,” he says, though he thinks May has already come and gone. “It’ll be the same spring in Russia.”

“Funny. I always knew I’d leave you both, but I never imagined you deserting me.”

“Life is like that, Anya.” She raises an eyebrow, and he feels a grin pull at the corners of his mouth. “You are not a country. You don’t need my help.”

“But people are like countries, aren’t they Gleb? You can’t own them, you can’t control them. But you can desert them. And you know what else?”

He shakes his head, pushing her hair behind her ear. She shifts, sitting back and sinking down, and he feels her promises pull and tighten sweetly around him.

“Countries cannot remember you as a coward.”

 

iii.

Leningrad welcomes him home like a dusty, moth-eaten blanket. He pretends he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He takes up patrolling the streets again. He likes the air, he likes the feeling of stones beneath his boots, he likes moving. He likes to pretend that he’s not desperately trying to stay in one forgotten moment while the city, the country, the world, stumble forward with trepid breath.

 

iv.

The heavy tread of soldier’s boots shaking the bones of buildings keep him up at night, and every night they storm past his door, he lets out half a breath. Night one, two, three, four, five… He counts through each unforgiving winter until one afternoon he yawns and realises it has been a decade since he has slept.

 

v.

Wars were not for winning, they were for surviving.

Anya had taught him that.

He had survived wars before. He’d survive this one as well.

 

vi.

Vodka rations were drained years ago but people still pour shots in dusty glasses, and comrades drink staunchly as if spirit itself could sustain them. It had for this long. He watches as wheat is replaced with sawdust, venison with a dead man’s thigh. Gleb’s stomach growls when he thinks of lemon and honey, and it’s been so long since he’s known hunger.

He meets a woman whose eyes, in the right light… Arms that are more bone than flesh rattle as he takes her to bed and he almost stops when it feels as if she’ll shatter beneath him. Almost. Bile brews in his belly when she trembles beneath him, her moans singing _traitor_ in his ear. She sighs softly when she is finished, and leaves when she thinks he is asleep. He doesn’t look for her. It is easier to not ask questions when people disappear.

 

vii.

He doesn’t like to think about the _what-ifs_ …

What if he died in the war?

What if he was the son of a different man?

What if a truck had never backfired?

What if, what if, what if he didn’t have to leave?

What if he had stayed? What if she came back? What if he wouldn’t hate her if she did?

He doesn't pray for a coup. He doesn’t pray for the siege to end. He doesn’t pray at all.

 

viii.

He’s not sure what compels him, but he writes his mother a letter. The last he had heard, she was alive. Small and grey and withered, but alive. He writes plainly, telling her not to worry, that she should not think herself cursed for loving such traitorous men.

Only half the page is taken up by his blockish writing, and he stares at the other half, unsure what to say, but the soft strings of memory play in his mind, and he wonders if this is what Anya heard before she knew herself.

He rips the page in half and writes her a letter, a plea, a cry, a confession, and places it selfishly in his pocket. She’d have never of seen it anyway.

 

ix.

He leans out of the window of his flat one night, watching men in coats and caps stalk through the city, the last of the samovars netted across their backs. As his starved body slumps into a chair, there is a knock at his door, and he laughs, a bloody, broken thing. Finally, there is an over-steeped bullet waiting for him.

He half expects a letter. A photograph. Something that was for his eyes, but not for his eyes. Black bars where black secrets were spilt. But there is no letter, no photograph, and there has been a gaping hole in his chest for so long that it doesn’t even hurt him.

They slap a charge against his name, and he can only hope that the bullet will plug him up and make him whole again.

 

x.

The young officer, so tall and proud in his uniform, looks at him coldly, and he finds it strange that sometimes you could look in a mirror and only see someone you used to be.

_Comrade Vaganov!_

And Gleb smiles as he remembers his name, sounds that were lost to him before he felt he was losing his mind. Sounds lost to hunger, lost to misery, lost to a woman in a ridiculous red dress.

_You have been accused of gross cowardice, counter-revolutionary thought, and planned desertion._

And he knows these words, had once recited them with such confident gusto. And he knows these words, because the woman he loved had accused him of the same. And he knows these words, because he wasn’t the only Vaganov with sins to atone for. He thinks it odd that they never changed the script. Perhaps they should. Perhaps they were stagnating as well.

_Do you deny these charges?_

He has heard that countries are like people, unable to be controlled. And he has heard that this land will not consume poisoned bodies. And he has heard that women you love will forget you eventually. He has heard that there are very few noble things to die for anymore.

But he was forged in a blood-red fire, and had become so good at clenching fists over his ears.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in docs for a while, as I was kind of hoping that I would, maybe one day, understand what I was trying to do with it? Alas, I don't think I ever will, so, enjoy it for what it is.  
>    
> The full Anna Akhmatova poem can be found [ here](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/905707626). I used a different translation for the intro to this and am having trouble tracking it down online (but it's the Catherynne M. Valente & Dmitri Zagidulin translation from _Deathless_ if interested (mmm, yes, I know, I’m that bitch)), but please do read the poem in full (it’s lowkey propaganda to only use the part I’ve used!). I’ve seen the poem’s publication date listed as both 1917 and 1918, and probably should’ve looked into it more before just choosing one and publishing!  
>   
>  You can chat me up on tumblr [here](https://wolves-girls.tumblr.com)!
> 
>  
> 
> ~~(I know that samovars are not teapots, I just wanted to the sentence to flow a certain way. Thank you.)~~


End file.
